Hey mates!
I'd like to share this one with you:
This festival is probably the only open air metal/rock festival in Ukraine, that takes place every year. The guy who runs it, invites us for the second time. A man of honor he is, struggling against all sorts of odds to keep it alive. So I felt a need to support the event.
Last year I helped them mastering the mixing desk sum (mono mixdown except for the reverb tails and keyboards) to get a decent audio on their DVD (and it's been pretty damn challenging!).
This year we brought our specialist and recorded 16 channels of audio for all the bands. Mixing the whole festival, hell yeah
Individual mixes to match the styles, varying from classic hard rock and ending with metalcore.
You know, it is a cool experience, with lots of new ideas popping out here and there. Using bleed is the most evident of them. But also dealing with dead drumheads, fucked up mics and all those sorts of things and understanding of live groove and all this quantize war going on these days.
Especially the drums. If the drummer is not consistent enough, the mix is doomed. And especially the kick. It's gonna get buried. On contrary, with the great player, you can get nice tones in almost any situation. What I'm saying sounds too captain obvious, and I knew it long before, but facing it in live situation was stunningly awakening.
And we're lucky we (me and our drummer) had a couple of hours to clean and tune those drums while the stage was built. Due to that, the drumset survived five bands and was still sounding more or less ok when we got on stage.
The top snare mic seemed to be a fake sm57. If not, then it probably knew too much beating - I know the sound of my snare drum with sm57 on it, and it was nothing like that. Some four stages of eq-ing, parallel compression, gating on the main channel and on the compression channel and a special plate reverb did the job. And I must say I'm kinda proud of that snare tone
Guitars are another thing that totally depends on the bands. Do guitarists use tuners often? Do they use them at all? Do they use screamers and noise gates? No? Then they will most probably fuck up the whole structure of the song and fill the mix with mud.
Bass guitars? Most often they tune 50 cents up, up to a semitone on the accents! A rude, rude awakening. And another proof that it's not the fancy gear, and very often not the FOH engineer, it's the musicians who make it sound good or bad live.
After trying Wavesrack on another gig, I've got several ideas for the future, regarding the concept of our live sound. I'll definitely share them with you as soon as I do some tests on rehearsals.
P.S.: Oh, I almost forgot. We're participating in SWEDEN ROCK festival voting. I'll just leave this link here: http://www.swedenrock.com/index.cfm?lg=2&pg=82
If you'd like to support us, it's easy. You do not have to register. Just follow the link above, choose "Morton-Ukraine" and click "Submit" at the bottom of the page. The voting is daily, one vote per day.
I'd like to share this one with you:
This festival is probably the only open air metal/rock festival in Ukraine, that takes place every year. The guy who runs it, invites us for the second time. A man of honor he is, struggling against all sorts of odds to keep it alive. So I felt a need to support the event.
Last year I helped them mastering the mixing desk sum (mono mixdown except for the reverb tails and keyboards) to get a decent audio on their DVD (and it's been pretty damn challenging!).
This year we brought our specialist and recorded 16 channels of audio for all the bands. Mixing the whole festival, hell yeah
Individual mixes to match the styles, varying from classic hard rock and ending with metalcore.You know, it is a cool experience, with lots of new ideas popping out here and there. Using bleed is the most evident of them. But also dealing with dead drumheads, fucked up mics and all those sorts of things and understanding of live groove and all this quantize war going on these days.
Especially the drums. If the drummer is not consistent enough, the mix is doomed. And especially the kick. It's gonna get buried. On contrary, with the great player, you can get nice tones in almost any situation. What I'm saying sounds too captain obvious, and I knew it long before, but facing it in live situation was stunningly awakening.
And we're lucky we (me and our drummer) had a couple of hours to clean and tune those drums while the stage was built. Due to that, the drumset survived five bands and was still sounding more or less ok when we got on stage.
The top snare mic seemed to be a fake sm57. If not, then it probably knew too much beating - I know the sound of my snare drum with sm57 on it, and it was nothing like that. Some four stages of eq-ing, parallel compression, gating on the main channel and on the compression channel and a special plate reverb did the job. And I must say I'm kinda proud of that snare tone
Guitars are another thing that totally depends on the bands. Do guitarists use tuners often? Do they use them at all? Do they use screamers and noise gates? No? Then they will most probably fuck up the whole structure of the song and fill the mix with mud.
Bass guitars? Most often they tune 50 cents up, up to a semitone on the accents! A rude, rude awakening. And another proof that it's not the fancy gear, and very often not the FOH engineer, it's the musicians who make it sound good or bad live.
After trying Wavesrack on another gig, I've got several ideas for the future, regarding the concept of our live sound. I'll definitely share them with you as soon as I do some tests on rehearsals.
P.S.: Oh, I almost forgot. We're participating in SWEDEN ROCK festival voting. I'll just leave this link here: http://www.swedenrock.com/index.cfm?lg=2&pg=82
If you'd like to support us, it's easy. You do not have to register. Just follow the link above, choose "Morton-Ukraine" and click "Submit" at the bottom of the page. The voting is daily, one vote per day.
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